Walking on clear mud
by achildofthestars
Summary: Oneshot - Zackcentric. The illusion has faded, or lifted, or exited left stage. Your eyes adjust to the dark, the room the same as it has been for months stacked upon hard and confusing months of acceptance.


**A/N: My, my. It's been almost a year since I've written anything for Bones...but I think I'm coming back into the fandom world again. Enough with meaningless information you don't care to know! LOL**

**Disclaimer: Bones of the property of Fox.**

* * *

There are moments, just small indefinable seconds of water dew vaporizing, that he forgets where he is in this world. It's like a window, much less concrete and very much more abstract than the sole window in his small room. Which is new to him. The abstract world, much like Angela says, is quite unpredictable and full of wonder.

It's funny, he thinks, as he tilts his head to an 83 degree angle, that someone who could tell you where a man who died seventy years ago, lived, is here. Painting with his toes. One stroke and another.

They used to marvel at his intellect, his precision, his mastery. Now, they touch him more than they ever did, whisper a few more lines than they ever cared to, and they even toss glances his way that he can't place from memory. It hits him when Hodgins throws a backward glance and a smile his way that what they are doing, is making him human. Isn't he already?

Logically, there's no way to go back and so no reason to even think about changing the befores and maybes and almosts. Ernie the Barber, as he likes to be called, motions his way and cuts the air with two fat fingers. They say E the B killed his son one night after the boy wet his bed in a fit of delusional rage.

In the dead of night, when blue is black and dark is night, but light is everywhere so that should something go wrong, everyone knows who has caused the problem, he opens his eyes to stare at the scraped metal wires holding the mattress of the bunk bed above him from falling onto his bones, flesh, muscles, cartilage, organs, however broken they may be already.

His eyes shift to the solitary window with dark and heavy bars lining the outside and inside inch thick plexi-glass that shines amazingly like real glass.

Then, he's gone.

-

Lost in that fantastical world where pink is blue and up is down while you aren't you and they aren't them anymore. You never met your destiny at some conference or betrayed your family that was more like your real family than your biological one. Life is normal. Life is…like it was before the befores and the maybes and the almosts. Which is good. You've hated maybes and almosts and befores nearly your entire drawn out and meandering life.

"Why do I always have to be the victim?"

You're on the ceiling of the Jeffersonian, Hodgins grasping your shoulder while limping on his left foot since he'd been bit by some wayward bug of his collection.

"Why can't Hodgins be the victim?"

You're being strangled by a woman's forearm with her light brown hair tickling the side of your chin and making you smile even as everyone tells you to be serious and focus.

"Let me guess. I'm the one about to get killed?"

You're softly thrown to the wall as his strong and skillful hands of death bring you into the position of that of the still growing fetus, and you wonder slightly if he would have murdered someone this way when he was a killer, or sniper, whichever is better.

"Am I playing dead?"

You fall over without grace or mercy of the kind and it earns you chuckles from Angela and Cam, but you're more intent on finding the spot where hard floor meets a possible broken zygomatic arch.

Suddenly, pink becomes pink and up, up, while down is finally down and they are them, and you are…you. You are you. It's like looking down to realize you're walking in mud that squishes between your bare toes. Not just any mud, mind you. But clear mud. Gelatinous mud, and you can't help but stop and become like a statue model waiting to be enshrined forever.

It makes no sense, and it shouldn't. It isn't real. Isn't fake. It simply…isn't at all. One slow step forward and the mud is gone and your toes aren't squishy or bathed with something close to wetness. The illusion has faded, or lifted, or exited left stage. Your eyes adjust to the dark, the room the same as it has been for months stacked upon hard and confusing months of acceptance.

"Can I be dead?"

The whisper uttered from your tired lips is heard by no one and never will be. You don't mean it. Or maybe you do which is why you never say those words again.

-

He lies awake the whole night after that. Staring at the window and trying to capture the mud that never really was and so is never meant to be caught by his burned and unusable hands. Even as the sun peeks in and shows him a sliver of orange on yellow, he keeps waiting for the window to reappear, waiting for the maybes and befores and almosts, because that's as close as he'll get to having his family the way it was when he was…happy.

He's not walking in clear mud, anymore, though.

* * *

**A/N: **In my scraggly looking brain, I thought it would be interesting to turn Zack away from the person he's been his entire life. Now that he's in the psychiatric ward, I wanted to see him break away from the numbers and the logic and the facts, to not embrace really, but accept the surreal and unnatural and fuzzy borders of wishes and dreams. Only to find too late, he can't be someone who he has never been, but he can't be the same methodical Zack he was before.


End file.
